Imagine a scenario where a group of people get together to frame the debate about science and even set out to conspiratorially place papers in highly-respected journals, selecting the ideal names to have on the paper and which publications would be most likely to publish it.

It must be those evil corporate chemical shills again, right?

Not this time, it was the International Workshop On Neonicotinoids in 2010 and it explains a lot about how the anti-science contingent has managed to maintain so much mindshare in media: they know how to work the system and created a 4-year plan to do just that.

The meeting notes start off as you expect - how to use Haber's Rule in order to force risk assessment using the US National Research Council's “Red Book” (NRC, 1983) guidelines for studying possible health effects of chemicals on humans and ecosystems. Haber's Rule says that multiplying the same concentration of a chemical compound by the same duration of exposure will yield the same biological response.

Environmentalists love to believe this, because it means that really low levels of any pesticide could be harmful over time, it just isn't true and never has been. In a study of 21 well-known chemicals the lowest observed adverse effect levels (LOAEL) using sub-acute, sub-chronic and chronic durations showed that the value of p, assumed to be 1 in risk assessment methodology, wasn't 1 for any of the chemicals. It's certainly Haber's Guideline For Environmental Activism, but not really a science rule and that is why impartial scientists say it shouldn't be used systematically for risk assessment in public health decision-making, like banning products. Instead, actual studies should be done that are not reviews of other papers.

Regardless, invoking Haber's Rule is just one approach in A time-honored strategy to manipulate science to achieve a political goal. This strategy has worked since the 1960s and I present it to you here, free of charge - because I do not work for an environmental corporation or anyone else so they can't pay me for it:

STEP 1: Get An Environmental Organization To Fund It

Science in the modern era is done by having a hypothesis and getting someone to pay for the work. Scientists fronting environmental groups know it saves a lot of time to flip that around and get the money first, then create the studies to match the conclusion.

In this instance, they got the International Union for Conservation of Nature and its Taskforce on Systemic Pesticides to foot the bill. You may not have heard of IUCN but they are the world's first - and largest - global environmental organization, with over 1,000 employees in 45 offices and hundreds of partners in government and NGOs.

Since IUCN has relationships with all of the other NGOs the conspirators assumed they could get a few friendly groups to pile on after they created the studies condemning neonicotinoids. As shown in Step 4, their secret plan was to get the the World Wildlife Fund (WWF - a non-chemophobe heavyweight) to lend its support.

STEP 2: With Funding In Place, Create A Task Force To Write A Paper

The Secret Activism Recipe:

(a) Be first to publish an incendiary paper so that it will be high impact . It's good for the journal, journals love popular articles, and good for the cause.(b) Choose the authors carefully from among the true believers but then include a bunch of other names in the section between the first and senior author to look international and interdisciplinary. You know, like a consensus.(c) Publish other lower-caliber papers right afterward to support the high-impact paper. You don't want them appearing before the paper with the Big Names you recruit.

This document is courtesy of Dr. Henk Tennekes, who is one of environmentalism's hand-picked critics of neonics and who has rabidly defended a non-expert, Dr. Chensheng (Alex) Lu, about shoddy neonics claims here on Science 2.0. The comments are his and he was kind enough to post it on the Internet as is, so we can see how they set out to get neonics banned.

They created a committee to map out papers to promote an environmental agenda using science as a "beard". They made sure to remember to include someone "experienced in high-impact publishing" because science is not really the goal, media attention is. Nature can't be happy they were only the second choice for planted stories about environmental hysteria.

STEP 3: Use The Papers To Legitimize A New Funding Campaign

In the 1980s, one seedy section of the stock market became famous for doing what land speculators had mastered in the past - selling swampland in Florida at a profit. With penny stocks, low-priced securities, brokerages modernized the scam and would get a group of 4 to 7 trusted insiders together, buy a stock, sell it to the next company in the chain and so on. Finally, the last company would sell it at the absolute highest price to its customers and the earlier brokerages would dump the stock from their house accounts and get rich. Then the stock plummeted after all of the sales. They took turns robbing their customers this way so no one company ever had a really bad track record.

What environmental groups are doing is instead Penny Stock Environmentalism. Someone writes a paper claiming Product X is harmful and throws in talk about p values and endocrine disruption, a bunch of other people endorse it and then donors for an NGO foot the bill after a snazzy fundraising campaign.

By writing papers citing each other they get media attention and when the claims appear enough times on enough environmental sites - bolstered by newspaper coverage now - that it shows up in the first 10 results of Google search, the science is settled and it's time to raise some dough.

STEP 4: Use The Funding Campaign To Pay Lobbyists To Talk To Politicians, Citing The Paper As Proof

In their 4-year plan, the conspirators note that once they have a study or two saying something suitably damaging, they can get other NGOs to pile on. Maarten Bijleveld, a founding member of WWF in the Netherlands and one of the co-authors of the strategy plan, is likely the one who wrote

If we are successful in getting these two papers published, there will be enormous impact, and a campaign led by WWF etc could be launched right away.

What is strange is that in their corporate conspiracy fantasy, they think chemical companies know what they are doing and will respond quickly:

A stronger scientific basis for the campaign will hopefully mean a shorter campaign. In any case, this is going to take time, because the chemical industry will throw millions into a lobbying exercise.

If Big Chemical were that smart, would they be kicked around by a dozen activists who created a 4-year strategy and even published it on the Internet so corporations could read it and have time to prepare?

Corporations are absolutely clueless about how to win against the emotional claims of anti-science groups. Do they end up spending millions? Sure, once the damage is done, but the people proactively preparing the battlefield are the environmentalists, not companies. While I was writing this, an employee at Ogilvy, a $16 billion company, which is getting paid by Intel, a $53 billion company, to engage in social media, wrote me and asked me to write about Intel for free.

That is the kind of dopey strategy corporations have.

Environmentalists know how things really get done. You get someone to go all Rachel Carson and a modern version of Joni Mitchell or Midnight Oil will write songs about the cause and bans will just happen. Politicians are not in the science business, they are in the anecdote business. Teary stories about dead bees in the Congressional Record count for a lot more than evidence.

It will be much harder for politicians to ignore a research paper and a Policy Forum paper in Science.

This is certainly true, and that is the goal - not accurate science or protecting the public. As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal, over a decade ago a crafty researcher had managed to get his paper hand-walked through Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) publication by getting an Academy member who is his friend to submit it and get it published with barely even an editorial review. The paper contained no data, a suspect methodology and the results have not been reproduced, but it accomplished its goal: The EPA was mobilized to re-investigate the herbicide that was targeted because the National Academy of Sciences was prestigious and politicians wanted to know if boy frogs were becoming girls.

The result: Years of time wasted by EPA scientists and millions of dollars in taxpayer money lost that could have been spent actually examining real environmental issues. Yet the paper is still cited by anti-science activists, who fly the author around to high schools on all-expenses paid junkets to promote fear and doubt about chemicals, because they know how propaganda works: Get to them young and they will most likely still believe when they are old enough to donate.

The roadmap for banning neonics was written in 2010. How did they do? I couldn't find papers by the conspirators in Science or Nature, which was their goal, so no plan is perfect. Yet they were able, as David Zaruk, adjunct professor at Vesalius College and Facultés Universitaires St-Louis and part of the team that created GreenFacts to encourage evidence-based decision-making about science in the EU, notes, to get neonics banned in the EU 16 months ahead of their timetable. And in the US, the Democrats who have written the EPA calling for a ban all cited the IUCN, even though scientists agree that bees are not dying off, but that the blip in deaths that happened was not caused by neonics.

That's got to be placed in the Win column for environmental groups, even though Zaruk notes that WWF never took the bait. Even without WWF helping, if this group was ever seriously worried about pesticide companies 'dumping millions' into lobbying, it was unfounded.

If chemical companies actually were as savvy as environmental corporations, someone would be in a boardroom right now, talking about their 4-year plan and me: "That Hank Campbell guy will write about actual science and evidence, even if we are an evil corporation. We should send him a Starbucks gift card or something."

But they are not doing that. When it comes to public relations and manipulating media for their own gain, environmentalists beat private sector companies hands down.

****

The following can't really be rules because they don't appear in strategic 4-year plans, but they are worth keeping in mind, so if you are from an environmental strategic marketing group and happen to be reading this, you are welcome.

Addendum 1: Peer Review Means Whatever We Want It To Mean

You can get the stamp of peer review approval from an august collection of experts for a Master's thesis now??? You can if you say the right things about a chemical.

And then...

Prof. Ramade complemented Tessa van Dijk on the important result obtained by proving the direct influence of the neonicotionoid insecticide imidacloprid on Diptera abundance. He considered it to be an excellent piece of work and important to be published.

It hadn't even been published but it already had the stamp of peer review. I am surprised astrologers have not figured out this technique; they could be in the Science section of the New York Times talking about Pisces and Libra if they just learned how to do peer review the way environmental activists do.

Addendum 2: Good Laboratory Practice is the enemy

If a study actually followed Good Laboratory Practice, dismiss it as "industry funded."

Addendum 3: Cite my paper

Let's not forget that we need to grease the wheels by citing the right papers, especially if the commenter wrote them:

David Zaruk, linked above, got an email from Jean-Marc Bonmatin noting that he is an employee of the French government (CNRS) and so it is a crime to criticize him,even as vice chair of an environmental task force.

It's little surprise France is the most anti-science government in Europe, apparently they will sue if you criticize a government employee who happens to be a conspirator for an environmental NGO.

Hank, the neonics debate has a long history going back to the 1990s. There’s nothing wrong with the concern of IUCN officials that neonics are going to cause a disaster, particularly after the publication of the authoritative CST (Comité Scientifique et Technique) report by the French government in 2003. That concern gained momentum by my discovery in 2009 about the dose-response characteristics of neonics in arthropods, which are identical to those of genotoxic carcinogens, for which very strict risk assessment procedures apply. The conclusion that neonics may not have a safe exposure level was highly disturbing, in view of widespread environmental pollution with neonics. So, the concern of the IUCN was well justified, Your conspiracy insinuations are ludicrous.

It's not an insinuation when a group of people are shown to be actively trying to game the peer review system in order to lay the foundation for their political agenda. It's evidence. And conspiracies happen all of the time, the document alleged chemical companies were going to engage in one - ironically, while you were helping them to create their own.

In a non-conspiracy scenario, Jean-Marc Bonmatin does not threaten to sue because his document was discussed. And yet he already has.

But as I said, I applaud your openness in hosting it so the public could see the willingness to create a plan to get the results the group wanted published in the right journal to then get a political ban. It's a shame the team didn't put all that effort into science.

These are violated in every segment of our society. The only novel aspect is eclectic terms such as "neonics". No one, other than scientists, understand, at a deep level, their meaning. The results, after decades, is the common distrust of all science, as simply a shill for some corrupt vested interest. Some assume it is always corporate funded. It is quite possible to be backed by an NGO or government.

This lying has debased journalism, law, and political science. Today, we have Democratic science and Republican science, which by definition is impossible, absurd. Infants die because their college educated parents will not permit inoculations. Fear of zoomies destroyed our civilian nuclear energy industries. Masses have died from malaria due to the abandonment of DDT. People starve as GM foods are not permitted.

America may be the first major nation to collapse due to phony science. Hitler's Germany, or Stalin's USSR might prove the opposite.

I knew a forester who had been hired by the Sierra Club to gather data around the Giant Sequoia National Monument. He gathered it and gave it to them. They never published the findings because those findings went against what they knew was "right."

Same thing happened to a friend's son working for Audubon. One day Audubon came in and shut the entire study down before it was completed. Again for finding inconvenient facts.

Thanks for this article. I have wondered for several years no about the honesty of the leaders and scientists of the antig.e./over react to the existence and use of any pesticide folks. It appears they are attempting to surpass the wrong doing of the U.S. military and the sellers of AO. as quickly as possible. To manipulate the system like this is truly pathetic and may well if they are successful lead to more environmental damage due to land clearing in food supply problem areas. Disgusting.

The chances of a well-connected French government scientist being able to bully EU citizens into not talking about this just got a lot slimmer: The London Times has also picked up on this story. Sure, France can sue a British newspaper but good luck with that, as the evidence was written by the conspirators.

Jean-Marc Bonmatin, you are still welcome to threaten me also. Since I am in the US, intimidating me with your friends in high places will not carry much weight: But I would love to enter the unethical behavior of this group into court documents.

Hadn't heard of Francisco Sánchez-Bayo before - he is an ecologist and all of those think they are bee experts - but, really, no one would ever heard of Laura Maxim either if she hadn't been preaching about this issue on command so it was perhaps smart on his part to jump in and get money or free trips to conferences. That they hired PR expert and former Greenpeace PR guru Mirella von Lindenfels to promote a ban shows that they were willing to spare no expense. They simply chose not to do any science, they clearly have the money to do so.

Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center (and former director of the Environmental Assessment Institute in Copenhagen) weighed in on this: Is it a ClimateGate-type scandal? Those conspirators felt like they were being hammered with FOIA requests (umm, just make the data available) and that Big Oil was undermining the science and they slowly devolved into madness.

This group set out to deceive, with no evidence at all that any company was suppressing evidence. That is a big difference.

@tennekes_tox He should apologize for trying to bully journalists who cite uncomfortable facts. "Top" scientists don't need to do that.

Sure, nothing remotely interesting in that other than that you are now again engaged in the self-aggrandizing zealotry that showed in the meeting: You are Gandhi and science is the oppressive British keeping you down.

The problem is that, as the quote shows, 'winning' is what is most important to you - that is why you and your co-conspirators have tried to deceive editors at journals and manipulate policy makers and the public - whereas the rest of us actually instead care about people and health and the environment and we see that your brand of tricks and deception does more harm for science acceptance than good.

Hank, you ignore scientific evidence that justifies the actions of the IUCN to bring about a ban on neonics. By doing so, you deceive your readers. Even worse, you get embroiled in a despicable smear campaign to discredit honourable scientists who are trying to prevent an environmental catastrophy the world has never seen before.

So the first case they had to pay to have it published and the second was just a brief Letter and not an article at all. It shows us that while people who are in the bag may be trying to undermine the science, it isn't working very well.

"So the first case they had to pay to have it published and the second was just a brief Letter and not an article at all".

This criticism is completely bizarre. PLoS ONE is a reputable journal with a high quality peer review process (you seem to have an irrational bias against open access journals). And the "Letter" is a standard (if antiquated) format for articles in Nature (I personally dislike the short format of the "Letter" in the printed version but the online version is of a decent length).

I'm one of the biggest supporters of open access so I can't see where your assertion about 'irrational bias' originates - but I do not give anyone a free pass. If you think any journal is peer reviewing 30,000 articles a year, you know nothing about peer review. What that particular journal does is editorial review - an editor checks off 4 boxes. Some do go to peer review, that was not one of them.

This is misleading. PLOS ONE does peer review, plain and simple. It is true that sometimes the editors can act as reviewers. Yes, the reviewer (not editor) has to "check 4 boxes" -- in addition to submitting their review. The main difference between this journal and others is that the peer review process only attempts to establish scientific rigor and technical soundness, and isn't distracted by the reviewers' subjective perceived "impact" of the paper. They have a lot of associate editors and reviewers (including occasionally myself, very different area of research though) spanning multiple disciplines, hence the 30k articles.

But anyway, the main point is that you dismissed the two publications with the claim "So the first case they had to pay to have it published and the second was just a brief Letter and not an article at all". These are both peer reviewed articles in mainstream journals that are generally respected. Payment is standard for open access, and the "Letter" format in Nature just means that the editors perceive the work to be less 'sexy' than an "Article".

The peer review process is imperfect for any journal, and if it failed in this case, then point out the flaws in the paper, rather than the format or the publishing model.

What is the environmental alternative to neonics recommended by these activists? Organic farming. Actual experts know that if organic farming actually worked for pest control, there would be no pest control industry.

In a post about neonics and the EPA, Henry Miller takes them to task for a different reason; saying that neonics are no benefit in soy after a rather hasty review. In defense of the EPA, they are usually pretty thorough, but I understand that different sections of it have different calibers of researchers and while most are not agenda-based or sloppy, some invariably will be.

Unfortunately, you fall into the trap that these activists fell into - no evidence but a lot of conspiracy thinking. Their own efforts to manipulate journals, the media and policy makers are right there and yet by pointing it out, I am the one guilty of "misinformation"? Please tell me you are American, and a Republican.

Bonmotin is still hammering on David Zaruk - an easy target since he has already threatened Zaruk with a lawsuit from the French government if anyone in Europe disputes his specious characterizations about science. His only evidence: "No Silent Spring Again", which shows they do not even understand the basics of DDT, and his circular reasoning committee claims, which they paid to have published.

Still no data, that group has not done a single study. They just wander around hoping someone else does work and then they can review it.

I enjoyed reading your comments chain Hank. Although I have not worked for industry in almost ten years, you should tell me where I, and others, could send that Starbucks gift card. What disturbed me most about the last week was how quick my media-host had moved against me - while the Times was "breaking the story", EurActiv was breaking me from their stable of bloggers because I was confrontational and people complained - they took my blog down for a good part of the second day. Trying to keep everyone happy is the objective in Brussels and if you can scream loud enough and threaten to tip over the apple cart, you have a good chance of winning. We are not talking about rational debate, and while I understand that my first blog has been discussed inside the European Commission, I expect activists to start screaming quite loudly soon to prevent further debate.

In Canada they use Activist Science to Ban Lawn Pesticides. Some paraded around as Fake Doctors to move their adgenda forward. Cancer Advocacy Groups admitted their true intentions to ban Agricultural Pesticides (http://tinyurl.com/ncp9cv2) .

Marteen Bijleveld is using his activist science to help forward the ban on agricultural pesticides with the help of several Canadian Non Profits. Here they are Expressing their concerns to the CBD – SBSTTA. http://tinyurl.com/ocyjgjn